Tag Archives: FDR

Years ago, in the infancy of our existence as a website, we wrote about The White House, because what is more American than having our President live a mansion where he can get his work done while having a cheeseburger sent to his room at 3AM as he drunkenly calls the President of Greece to tell him that Ouzo sucks? But we didn’t really devote a lot of time to the actual Oval Office, where shit gets done. And when we think of the one defining feature of the Oval Office (other than the shape, smartass), we think of the desk where the President sits and, we can say this with absolute certainty, farts at least a few times a day.

The President’s desk is ornate, and “presidential” and, somewhat shockingly, usually shared. In fact, in the whole history of the White House, there have only been six desks used in the Oval Office, many shared by Presidents with very different ideologies who somehow have managed to avoid carving dicks in the wood as a gift to their successors. We’re amazed they had the restraint. We wouldn’t have. If we had to give our desk to the guy replacing us, it’d be dick central. You couldn’t find a spot on the thing that didn’t have dicks.

This article is not going to be about dicks carved into White House furniture. It is, however about…

Outside of children who are big fans of those Planes movies, nowhere in American society is a single aircraft more iconic than Air Force One. When we fly our President around, we fly him in style, in a cutting-edge jet that can survive a direct blast from a nuclear bomb and is exclusively piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Okay, neither of those things are true, but Air Force One is so mythic that a decent handful of you absolutely took us for our word there.

Air Force One is an American icon, both over and underappreciated at the same time. So we decided to take a moment to sit you down (you are sitting, right?) and tell you about the history of our President’s super expensive charter jet. And since we’re feeling generous, we’ll just let you know about every Air Force One plane that has ever existed, partly because we like to be as thorough as we can when it comes to discussing presidential aircraft, but mainly because we want as many excuses to post scenes from the movie Air Force One on our site.

We recently wrote an article that focused on the Medal of Honor—mainly, how the military’s highest honor, now given only to acts of almost impossible levels of valor, was sort of tossed around pretty willy-nilly in the years after the Civil War and before World War I. In that discussion, we briefly mentioned a U.S. Marine named Smedley Butler, who straight up tried to turn down his first Medal of Honor (yes, he was later awarded a second one) because he didn’t think he deserved it. We then came to realize that Smedley Butler, a badass with a kind of funny first name, isn’t really well known to the casual American—hell, we had only sort of stumbled across his career by accident.

And that’s some bullshit, because Smedley Butler died as the most highly decorated Marine in U.S. history, and served 34 years where he managed to collect medals, tropical diseases, and tactics for tricking the enemy like it was his job. Well, it sort of was his job, he was a marine, but you get the picture.

So allow us to spend three thousand words or so gushing about Smedley Butler, The Fighting Quaker.

As we’ve established time and time again, we’re not the best at math, but as far as we can tell, America has been a country for over 150 years, and has had more than 40 presidents. 43 presidents maybe? 45? Either way, it’s less than 50. And that means that anytime you have the chance to become the President of the Most Powerful Country In The World (pre-2008 division), your name will be in the history books, even if it’s just as a footnote.

The problem with being a part of history is that the first and, in some cases only, thing that we see in a history book is the name of the person. Yes, we know that George Washington had fake teeth and liked to stand up on boats, but the first thing we register about him is his name. George Washington. A strong, authoritative name that screams “Presidential.” Now not all of our Presidents were blessed with such a fitting name (looking at you, Herbert Hoover) but they at least managed to have names that didn’t actively get in the way of their political gains.

Which is why we’re here to focus on those whose name did get in the way. The Presidential candidates that got their names on the ballots, failing to realize that maybe they should have changed their name before making the entire population read their name in the polling booth and suppress a giggle. That’s why we present for you…

The staffers of AFFotD have a soft spot in their heart for The Mountain, the geniuses behind the Big Face Animal shirts who still haven’t taken us up on our offer to graciously accept any free products they’d be willing to send our way, but that’s neither here nor there. The Mountain is staffed by dedicated workers who, we assume, are a lot like us here in the America Fun Fact of the Day offices. We imagine that they, like us, spend their weekdays recovering from the temporary blindness that inevitably occurs after swigging moonshine from a poorly maintained sill, whispering into the void “what now?” as the void whispers back “you need a T-shirt of a Gorilla in a spacesuit giving you a thumbs up.” The void is wise.

The Mountain has perfected the art of T-shirts that are stylish, comfortable, and work surprisingly well as a makeshift pot handler in a mobile meth lab, but that doesn’t mean they’re content to rest on their laurels watching stacks of dollar dollar bills flood their P.O. boxes. No, they are constantly striving to make new and exciting shirts because goddamn it, someone out there wants to wear a giant house fly face on their chest, and if The Mountain isn’t going to oblige them, who the fuck will?

So every now and then we like to bring up The Mountain catalog and list some shirts you need to be buying at this very moment. It’s partially a public service announcement, partially a play to get free shit from The Mountain, and somehow the free publicity we offer actually counts towards our community service hours for some reason. America!

The Latest And The Greatest From The Mountain and Big Face Animal Shirts

Art is okay, we guess. It’s one of the classiest ways to see boobs, and if you have a friend that’s deciding to not make money by painting shit for a living, you at least can go to their gallery openings for an evening of free wine and sub-par cheese spreads. And there are plenty of Americans who have added very iconic and significant contributions to the artistic and pop culture world, like that one guy who designed the label for Campbell’s soup.

But if there are kinds of art that we don’t particularly care for (looking at you, 25 foot black canvas with a single silver dot on it), there’s one that we can never get enough of. And that would be images of American presidents and historical figures doing badass things in impossible contexts. We’ve shown some of these images on our site before, but now it’s time we give proper due, thanks to the gentle prodding from Bro Bible, to American digital artist Jason Heuser. Because any man that can depict Ben Franklin with Wolverine claws fighting Zeus deserves our money.

The America Fun Fact of the Day office takes pride in showing the best and brightest of America. When our readers see these tales of past and present heroes, we like to think they strive to be better Americans, to grab life by the horns, go down swinging, and various other clichés. Early bird gets the worm. Whatever.

And while it’s easy to look at shining beacons of American hope, we often overlook the sinkholes in our society. Unfortunately, for every Abraham Lincoln, there is a John Wileks Booth. For every FDR, there’s a Snookie. For every Jack Kerouac, there is a hungover America Fun Fact of the Day writer making a cheap Jersey Shore joke that will read as gibberish in five years. To truly see our own greatness, we have to see how we, as a nation, deal with punk ass idiots.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the children. Most of our staff never really had what most people would consider a “conventional childhood.” We never had the opportunity to learn how to play 4 square or hopscotch, we just learned the vintages of actual Scotch. We never got to run in the park and skin our knees, we had to learn how to effectively run a craps table (apparently a well trained 10 year old craps dealers is a goldmine for an underground casino). We didn’t get a chance to play Little League baseball, we had to go straight to the majors (the kid from “Rookie of the Year” just joined our staff).

Pictured Above: The Last Time the Cubs Won the World Series

Children offer a unique perspective for us, since we never had a point where we thought like them. When we were six years old, our parents would be concerned if we weren’t belligerently drunk. But when we ask parents why their kid seems so distressingly sober, they just seem to get upset and say things like, “You’re joking right?” and, “What do you mean that a child’s natural state is drunk?” and “You poured what into his apple juice?” and “Get out of here you monster or we’re going to call the police.” It’s baffling.

One day during lunch, our staff was all outside, horsing around and playing our staff-only game of “Kick in the dick, Punch in the tit,” where our female staffers punch each other in the breasts, and the male staffers kick each other in the groin. Come to think of it, no one knows why we play it, and no one particularly enjoys it. But, anyway, as a combination of masculine and feminine voices were shouting, in unison, “KICK IN THE DICK!” and “PUNCH IN THE TIT,” we looked over to see a small group of children had gathered, and were mimicking our every move. Sure, their form was sloppy (the key is to pivot your standing foot during the kick if you really want to try to shatter something) but they were just like little clones. Moldable tiny people.

“AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” (Picture unrelated)

There are many theories about what children are. Tiny people with heads that are proportionally too large for their bodies. “Our future.” The continuation of our species. Lab experiments. We’ve heard it all, and we at America Fun Fact of the Day feel that there is a simple way to think about children.

They are something we have to stop. Children are, in fact, our future, but you know who the future muscles out? The goddamn present. That’s right. In thirty years, those snot nosed kids are going to be the ones to make fun of us for being so “old fashioned” we can’t even adjust our F chip setting to work on more than 5 Farmville accounts, and they’ll say shit like, “Haha, yahoo? What the hell, grandpa, are you living in the 20th century?” Those fucking kids. They’re just waiting for the right moment to muscle us out and form the Republic of, I don’t know, Digimon or whatever (do kids still like Digimon? No? Dammit). So no matter how much we attempt to mold them into little, obedient, groin kicking servants, it won’t make a lick of difference. They’re out to get us. So, before they run us out and change the AFFotD into like, a goddamn Justin Bieber fan page or some shit, we’re going to get our licks in at these brats.

Some people say “Children are the future,” others say, “The future is now.” We say “The future…must be stopped.”

Hey, don’t let poor execution muddle your opinion of a solid idea

The reason why we’re going on this for so long is that we stumbled across an article from Scholastic Magazine. Back in our day, Scholastic Magazine was just that place that sent out those book order forms where you could ignore all the “educational” books and just get yourself a book of Calvin and Hobbes (is it the most American comic, or is it the most American comic?) for like 5 bucks. Apparently now they’re asking kids shit like, “What does it mean to be American.”

Well we got news for you, kids. It’s not your time yet, it is our time. So let’s savagely immolate your opinions, AFFotD style, in today’s fun fact…

America Fun Fact of the Day Insults the Shit Out of a Lot of Kids Who Can’t Defend Themselves (But It’s Okay Because They’re After Our Jobs, and are Stupid)

“Chewing gum is a lot like heroin, since both are incredibly enjoyable.”

~William S. Burroughs

Chewing gum is an enigmatic American invention. While it combines ancient history, American ingenuity, and tooth decay, it is not considered to be as awesomely American as alligator wrestling or cage matches (or any combination of the two). But, in reality, chewing gum is an underappreciated yet surprisingly American commodity.

First, ask yourself a question. Who makes chewing gum? Wrigley’s of course. And where do the Chicago Cubs, America’s most American loveable losers play? Wrigley Field.

Did you know: Those two are named after the same fucking guy.

Once you pick up the pieces of your exploded cranium, the America Fun Fact of the Day presents to you…